Apple’s antitrust fight begins

Image: Alex Parkin / The Verge

Over the people of 88 pages of amazingly readable legalese, the US Department of Justice attempted to marque the lawsuit that Apple is simply a problem. Apple, the DOJ alleges successful its sweeping antitrust complaint, has systematically crushed innovation successful the smartphone world, robbing not lone competitors but besides iPhone users of the accidental to get amended bundle and usage amended hardware.

The statement is complicated, but it has an atrocious batch successful communal with different large antitrust trial, 1 the authorities won much than 2 decades ago: US v. Microsoft. That lawsuit was astir a immense corp ruthlessly moving to neutralize immoderate institution that threatened to unfastened up its walled gardens, marque it casual for radical to physique and usage cross-platform software, oregon extremity the power it had implicit its massively palmy and massively fashionable platform. This 1 is precise antithetic but besides precise overmuch the same.

On this occurrence of The Vergecast, we speech astir the DOJ’s complaint. A lot. For similar an hr and a half. We speech astir the 5 main parts of Apple’s ecosystem — ace apps, the unreality streaming, messaging apps, smartwatches, and integer wallets — that the DOJ is acrophobic with. We inquire which arguments marque sense... and which don’t. And then, we effort to handicap however agelong this is each going to instrumentality to shingle out. The implicit / nether is acceptable astatine 2030 earlier everything is settled. What would you bet?

After that, we merchandise Nilay Patel into his Mexican vacation, and we bash a newsy lightning round. We astir negociate to halt talking astir Apple. Almost.

If you privation to work much connected everything we talked astir successful this episode, present are a fewer links to get you started, opening with Apple’s antitrust case:

• US v. Apple: everything you request to know
• The afloat suit (it’s truly an absorbing read!)
• Apple’s effect to the DOJ’s iPhone antitrust lawsuit
• US sues Apple for amerciable monopoly implicit smartphones
• Five takeaways from the immense US antitrust suit against Apple
• Apple CarPlay is anticompetitive, too, US suit alleges
• How Apple’s warfare connected ace apps became the halfway of its antitrust fight
• The lock-in occupation astatine the bosom of the Apple monopoly lawsuit

And successful the lightning round:

• Alex Cranz’s archetypal pick: YouTube TV’s multiview comes to iPhones and iPads successful clip for March Madness
• David Pierce’s archetypal pick: Beeper couldn’t bring iMessage to Android — but it tin inactive marque a large chat app
• Alex’s 2nd pick: These toddler games for iPad are really bully — and that’s each excessively rare
• David’s 2nd pick: What other tin Humane’s AI pin do?